Bonnie Huang: Diurinal Divinty exhibition text

Bonnie Huang: Diurinal Divinity, Puzzle Gallery. 2024

I’m texting my friends…we are sooooo back from a bathroom stall I have to claw my way out of. Another drink, I think; a dart, the skinny ones that taste like apple-mint; no more, no way, I need to find god. I peek through the crack of my temporary hovel, I pray my weakened state remains unseen – taking shelter, I hope for a familiar face to appear, to pass me a roll under the door and hold my hand for just a little bit. I take a piss. Scooping up the fallen cardigan around my feet, I see the ground is stained and the metal fittings around me slicked with grease, corroded by fingerprints into stages of undress. Stumbling out I catch the attention of two girls who tell me I’m pretty, I look at them with that slow wide eyed amazement, drunkenly turning my head to look behind me. When I finally face them again, by divine miracle I see them glowing – their skin like mirrors, my reflection in their faces.

With our senses we are led by curiosity – the active touch, to seek a taste or smell. To surfaces, objects, places that unfurl themselves and embrace our impressions - on them we leave something notable like nostalgia, community, worship, and yet they are wordless and silent. It is a type of divinity. With rejection in traditional religious spaces, it is no wonder that so much of queer history is told and remembered through public bathrooms. In essence, it is where we gather and create belonging amongst those who feel they can enter. Within, urinals and toilet bowls observe the utilitarian (the processes and cycles of our physical bodies) and then beyond that they house a fictive refuge dictated by a level of exclusivity created by its occupants. No two bathrooms are ever the same.

In the modern day, as socially and politically charged spaces, they exist as contested thresholds. Protecting this notion of vulnerability – the gross, the sensual, and complete mundanity– it is what icons we use to adorn them that makes these places unique and exclusive. For us, there’s solace where one can be invisible, anonymous, smashing out the fluorescent lights in the Horden Pavilion toilet– creating makeshift sanctuaries, robed in aluminium and ammonia. The bathhouses in Bondi – the Taylor square bathrooms – divine spaces that still represent a sense of belonging even now when they are functionally gone. It is illogical to cling to them, to remember the exchanges like fiction, but religion rarely has reason.

Bonnie Huang’s Diurinal Divinity – the line between spiritual and sexual, that traces within us our consumption of desire, the transformative power of queer intimacy. Leading us to these sensory reflections which connect the ordinary to something more transcendent, the bathroom where bodies intersect, the place where I see my basest self in others. Taking brief moments of processing//urinating, it is the object’s attentive silence that facilitate spaces for our liberation and our resistance to sanitization.